jkkramer

EDIT: To clarify/expand something: If I ever chose to charge a fee, it would be for solving the "disorganized pile of bookmarks & print-outs" problem, not so much for access to recipes, which you can get anywhere. Of course, people may not be willing to pay for that either.

Maybe I was doing it wrong, but it seems like if your app has more than a little data and you plan on changing your mind about how best to present it, you will experience discomfort.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2009/wood...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722

Also, when it comes to programming, the biggest bottleneck for most people isn't typing -- it's thinking.

P.S., there do exist mouse-heavy programming environments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language

"We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.

* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding."

There are probably all sorts of caveats to this (and the research may have changed since then) but I'm reminded of it whenever I see people extolling the virtues of their ascetic, keyboard-centric dev environment. I'm not saying they're wrong, just that in lieu of benchmarks and studies, I'm skeptical.

[1] http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

  Clojure: 3 years old
  PHP: 15
  Java: 15
  Ruby: 15
  Python: 19
  Objective-C: 24

Users may have better luck finding quality recipes by going to curated sites Cooks Illustrated rather than mob-rule sites like RecipeZaar. As with social sites (Digg, Reddit, HN), the chemistry of the community and the influence of the admins can have a powerful effect on the quality of the content. It also depends on what you're looking for. If all you want is cheesy enchiladas, recipes from the popular sites will work just fine.

There are many sites (not to mention books and periodicals) which have thought and care put into their recipes, often with supplementary material which helps you understand what you're doing and become a better cook, rather than just an ingredient-assembling automaton.

Another aspect to consider is that many people like to read (or watch) things about food but don't actually cook much. That's why the Food Network has become so popular (ever notice how all their commercials are for ready-made products?). A pet peeve of mine is to see 5-star reviews with a comment like, "Looks delicious! Will try making it sometime." Pretty annoying, but some people just like to watch. Maybe that's why recipes with pictures get higher ratings.

You might want to lock down functions like glob() and readfile() in PHP -- they effectively give the coder read access to your file system.

One of the coolest anecdotes from the book: the average performance of marathon runners increases from age 19 to 27, when it reaches its peak. Performance returns to the 19-year-old level at age 64. That's not true for any other sport. (Citation needed, obviously, but I don't have the book handy.)

The book also gives interesting examples of biological traits we possess, such as bone and muscle configurations, that only appear in animals that run a lot. I'm not saying the book is scientifically rigorous or conclusive, just that there's more to it than appears in this article.

http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/

Many of his articles have been posted on HN and elsewhere already.

    <?php
    $fn = "shel" . "l_exe" . "c";
    echo nl2br(htmlentities($fn("cat response.php")));
    ?>

I've had IKEA stuff but I enjoy having furniture with history so much more. I recently acquired (for nothing) a huge, old wood desk that belonged to a CEO. There's a cabinet door on the side, out of which comes a mechanical shelf that I'm guessing was once used for a typewriter. Fascinating!

Given, it's hard to get ahold of the right furniture if you're not willing to pay much. But I've been slowly replacing my particle board with real wood, and spending less than I did on the fake stuff. It just takes time.

I use "straightforward" to describe trivial problems, when I can see the implementation path clearly. "Trivial" implies easy and quick to most people. It's not hard for them to grasp, you just have to communicate more clearly.

[1] http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi

It's simple: smile, make eye contact, show interest, ask questions. You will probably feel like an idiot. Repeat until confidence outweighs fear. If you're smart, use your brain for wit, not for showing off.